The lack of formal education and competences of the Portuguese workers is one of the biggest problems of the country. This lack is not shrinking at the wanted speed and the young generations still lag far behind the ones in other OCDE countries. This paper studies the intergenerational transmission of education achievement, in particular higher education completion, trying to see the influence of parents education and labor market conditions while the child was growing up in their future attainment. We conclude that the education of the parents is very important even if it is only one of them that has it. This influence seems not to be independent of the gender of the parent that has it. The fact that the parents face unemployment has a negative effect on the educational achievement of the child. Females perform better than males, but the gap decreases if the father has low education or is facing unemployment problems.